There is currently a bill being considered in Congress that would mandate a new set of permitting requirements for wireless and wired infrastructure. The bill is H.R. 2289 – the American Broadband Deployment Act of 2025.

The bill first started with the goal of making it easier to get permits for BEAD and other federally grant-funded projects, but the bill has grown to encompass all local and state permitting for telecommunications infrastructure.

The heart of the changes that would come from the passage of the bill are as follows:

• The legislation would create a shot clock from 60 to 150 days during which a state or local government must approve or deny a request for a permit to construct a wireless or wireline project. If the locality doesn’t respond in that time frame, the request is automatically assumed to be “deemed granted”.
• The legislation would create similar shot clock rules for any carrier seeking a cable franchise.
• The bill would eliminate the need for environmental impact studies or historic preservation reviews for any project not considered to be a major federal action under NEPA rules.
• The law would make it easier to get permits on tribal lands.
• The law would restrict permitting fees to recover only actual costs, instead of the traditional standard of reasonable costs.

Interestingly, the bill doesn’t address the biggest permitting issue in the rural areas where BEAD grants will be built, which is getting permits on federal lands. I’ve worked with a few ISPs where the process of crossing federal lands took almost two years. However, the law applies to state highways and state parklands, so it will be easier to build across a state park, but not a federal one.

The legislation doesn’t address the other issues with getting permits in rural areas. While I am sure there are exceptions, most of the folks I know who are building rural fiber projects tell me that most County governments invite them in with open arms. The rural permitting problems that cause the most delays and headaches continue to be crossing railroads and bridges, which are not addressed by the legislation.

As you might imagine, this legislation is being vigorously opposed by local governments, who say the new permitting preempts local authority over public right-of-way, zoning, and permitting. They argue that the restriction of using actual costs means they can’t charge enough to pay for the longer-term monitoring and management of granted rights-of-way.

The biggest local objection to the law is that this would severely limit the ability of local officials to regulate the placement, construction, and modification of cell towers. It would finally give cellular companies the ability to place towers in residential areas or near historic sites.

The legislation clearly reads like a wish list for the giant carriers and gives them the freedom to build what they want, where they want. The authors of the bill took a bill intended to make it easier to build grant-funded rural networks and applied it to the whole country. That feels like solving a relatively small rural problem related to speeding up grant construction as a pretext to apply a sledgehammer solution for all construction. The majority of broadband construction happens in cities and suburbs, not in rural America. Some of those places have complicated situations that should not be lumped together with rules aimed at speeding up rural grants.

I’m sure there will be ISPs and carriers that read this who can tell horror stories of why this is needed. But I also know folks who have built a huge number of rural projects where permitting from local governments was not difficult or expensive.

It will be interesting to see if this passes in Congress. There were several broadband-related bills that passed the House last week, and this bill didn’t make it yet. Every member of the House who votes for this is telling the local governments in their district that Congress knows more about permitting than the local folks who have been doing this forever.